The Scale of the Crimes in Gaza
Things are turning very, very, very dark in Gaza. What appears to be transpiring is an event that we will look back on as a vast and almost incomprehensible crime. No hospitals are functioning in the north; indeed, the northern half of the strip is utterly uninhabitable and is now resembling a moonscape. Reports and images are surfacing of detention camps, with torture occurring and summary executions. To see the adult men, boys, old & disabled men stripped to their underwear, seated on the pitch of a soccer stadium, their wrists secured with with plastic binds that bite and grip so deeply they leave scars, brings to mind images we have seen or stories we have heard about Bosnia in 1995, Chile in 1972, the Cherokee Trail of Tears. 20,000 dead. 8000 missing. 50,000 injured. 1.9 million displaced. Entire family lines vanished, bombed into dust. People describe daily existence now in the south of the strip as a scramble to find something to eat, something to drink and to avoid being bombed into oblivion.
By now, it is evident that the Netanyahu project in Gaza is not merely a response to the awful massacre of 10/7. Bibi has said as much. Recently, he commented that he would never accept the establishment of a Palestinian state, and over the weekend he remarked about Gaza, “Regarding voluntary immigration … This is the direction we are going in.” Like every demagogue, Bibi is a skillful bullshit artist and enthusiastic mangler of language: “Voluntary migration” refers to people leaving Gaza after everything there has been destroyed and tens of thousands of people have been killed.
It’s 2023 and humanity has been waging idiotic wars for at least 10,000 years. The US carried out a genocide of the native inhabitants of this land and engaged in a mass-scale enterprise of transoceanic human trafficking and chattel slavery; it bombed huge areas of both Vietnam and Iraq into burning wastelands; it has funded and supported monstrous dictators throughout Latin America, the Middle East and Asia; and it is now enthusiastically sending armaments being used to erase a people in Palestine. Joe Biden, the Congress and the mainstream media have no excuse: They know our history, they know foreign affairs, and they understand what is happening.
So do we. We can speak up, call feckless politicians, march, write, draw, paint, sing and do anything we can think of to try to stop this. It is worth remarking that opposing this war and being vocal about it does not make one an antisemite. Indeed, at least in the United States, many of the most eloquent and organized leaders against the war are Jewish. I strive to be a committed anti-antisemite, antiracist & anti-fascist. I despise the ignorance of bigotry with everything I have. Opposing this operation of ethnic cleansing is simply about trying to be a morally consistent, compassionate person.
DH 12/27/23, Chicago
